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The Lost Tribes of the Irish 
in the South 



AN ADDRESS 

BY 

IRVIN S. COBB 

AT THE 

ANNUAL DINNER OF THE AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL 

SOCIETY, WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, 

JANUARY 6, 1917. 



Office of Edward H. Daly, Secretary-General, 52 Wall Street. 



NEW YORK 
19 17 



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THE LOST TRIBES OF THE IRISH IN THE SOUTH. 

The after-dinner address of Mr. Irvin S. Cobb of Kentucky — so well known 
throughout the length and breadth of the land as an American of Americans and 
writer of vivid stories of American life, throbbing with pathos, alive with infec- 
tious humor, keen observation and dramatic force ; as a war correspondent and 
picturer of the naked horrors of war ; as a lecturer and general publicist — will be 
hailed with interest and pleasure everywhere. The American Irish Historical So- 
ciety does itself the honor of issuing the address in this form in advance of its 
appearance in the Quarterly Review of the Society, that it may be more widely 
known and the facts it sets forth more widely grasped. It treats its subject — 
the Irish share in the early upbuilding of the Southern States — in a masterly way, 
in direct line with the Society's motto, "To make better known the Irish chapter 
in American history." 

Editors are cordially invited to reproduce the address in whole or in part. 

JOSEPH I. C. CLARKE, 
President-General, 
American-Irish Historical Society. 
New York, January, 1917. 



MR. COBB'S ADDRESS. 



Mr. President, and Ladies and Gen- 
tlemen : 1 am speaking but the plain 
trutli when I tell you tnat I would rather 
be here to-night facing an assemblage 
of men and women of Irish blood and 
Irish breeding than in any other banquet 
hall on eartn. For i am one who is 
Irish and didn't know it; but now that 
I do know it, I am prouder of that fact 
than of any other thing on earth except 
that I am an American citizen. 

I wonder if it ever occurred to you, 
what differences are to be found in many 
a country and in almost any country, 
between the temperaments and the spir- 
its and the customs of those who live 
in the north of it and those who live 
in the south of it? To tl:e north, to 
Prussia, the German Empire has always 
looked for its great scientists and its 
great mathematicians and its propound- 
ers and expounders of a certain cool and 
analytical philosophy ; but it was to the 
south, to Bavaria and to Saxony, that 
Germany had to turn for its poets and 
its story-tellers. 

It was the north of France that pro- 
duced and yet produces those men who 
have harnessed the forces of nature, 
who have made the earth tremble to 
the pulse-beat of their factories, who 
took the ore from the earth and the 
coal from the hillsides, and with them 
v/rought out the great steel industries of 
that country; but it was out of the south 
of France that there came its marvelous 
fiction writers and minstrel-bards, its 
greatest poets and its greatest dream- 
ers; and out of that same south once 
upon a tim.e there came, too, a fiery out- 
pouring of shock-headed men and 
women who wore wooden shoes on their 
feet and red caps on their heads and 
who marched to the words of a song 
which has become the fighting song of 
every nation, craving liberty and daring 
to march and to die for it — the "Mar- 
seillaise Hymn." (Applause.) 

The names of the Poid M lanaise and 
the Lombards and the Venetians of 
northern Italy are synonymous with 
frugality in domestic affairs and energy 
in commercial pursuits, but it is down 



in the tip of the toe of the Latin boot 
that we find the Italian who loves tue 
liardest and sings die, loudest and fignts 
for the very love of the iightmg. 

The north of Ireland, as we all know, 
has fathered the great bus.ncss men ol 
that little island, and the great manu- 
facturers and the great tlieologians, 
many of tliem ; and, regretful lo say, it 
has also produced a spawn of hur. an 
beings who, in the face of the fact t..at 
in every other land where men have 
equal opportunities, the Irishman has 
won his way to the front and has h^eld 
his own with prince and potenlate, yet 
cling to thie theory th.at in Ireland, of 
all the spots of the world, the Irish- 
man is not capable of governing hmi- 
self. But it was to the south of Ire- 
land, and it is to the south of Ireland 
to-day. tjiat one must turn to find the 
dreamer and the writer, th.e idealist and 
the poet. It is to the south of Ireland 
also that one must turn to seek for a 
people whose literature and whose tra- 
ditions are saddened by the memory of 
the wrongs they have withstood and the 
persecutions they liave endured and still 
endure, and yet whose spirits and whose 
characters are uplifted and sanctified by 
that happy optimism which seems every- 
where on this footstool to be the heri- 
tage of the true southerner. (Applause.) 

In a m^easure these same things are 
true of our own country. The north 
excels in business, but the soutli leads 
in romance. The north opens wide the 
door of opportunity to every man who 
comes to its borders with willing liands 
and eager brain, and commands him to 
get busy. The south opens a door, too, 
but it is the door of hospitality, and it 
bids the stranger enter in, not so m.uch 
for what he can give, but for what he 
can take in the way of welcome. I think 
there is a reason, aside from topography 
and geography and climate and environ- 
ment, for tliese differences between the 
common divisions of our great country. 
And I am going to come lo that reason 
in a minute. 

As a boy, down soutli, there were two 
songs that stirred me as no other songs 



could^one was a song that I loved and 
one a song that I hated, and one of 
these songs was the hattle hymn of the 
south, "Dixieland," and the other was 
"Marching Through Georgia." But once 
upon a time when I was half-grown, a 
wandering piper came to the town where 
I lived, a man who spoke witli a brogue 
and played with one. And he car- 
ried under his arm a wierd contraption 
wliich to me seemed to be a compound 
of two fishing poles stuck in a hot-water 
bottle, and he snuggled it to his breast 
and it squawked out its ecstasy, and then 
he played on it a tune called "Garry- 
owen." And as he played it, I found 
that my toes tingled inside my shoes, 
and my heart throbbed as I thought it 
could only throb to the air of "Dixie." 
And I took counsel with myself and I 
said, "Why is it that I who call myseli 
a pure Anglo-Saxon should be thrilled 
by an Irish air?" So I set out to de- 
termine the reason for it. And this is 
the kind of Anglo-Saxon I found out 
I was : 

My mother was of the strain, the 
breed of Black Dotiglas of Scotland, 
as Scotch as haggis, and rebels, all of 
them, descendants of men who followed 
the fortunes of Bonnie Prince Charles, 
and her mother lived in a county in 
North Carolina, one of five counties 
where up to 1820, Gaelic was not only 
the language of the people in the street, 
but was the official language of the 
courts. It was in that selfsame part 
of North Carolina that there lived some 
of the men who, nearly a year before 
our Declaration of Independence was 
drawn up, wrote and signed the Meck- 
lenburg Declaration, which was the first 
battle-cry raised for American independ- 
ence. On the other side, I found, by 
investigation, that my father's line ran 
back straight and unbroken to a thatched 
cottage on the green side of a hill in 
the Wicklow Mountains, and his people 
likewise had some kinsmen in Galway, 
and some in Dublin with whom, fol- 
lowing the quaint custom of their land, 
they were accustomed to take tea and 
fight afterwards. (Applause and laugh- 
ter.) I found I had a collateral ances- 
tor who was out with tlie pikes in the 
'98 and lie was taken prisoner and tried 
for high crimes and misdemeanors 
against the Britisli Government, and was 
sentenced to be hanged by the neck un- 
til he was dead and might God have 
mercy on his soul ! And lie was hanged 
by the neck imtil he was dead, and I am 
sure God did have mercy on his soul. 



for that soul of his went marching on, 
transmitting to his people, of whom I 
am proud to be one, the desire to rebel 
against oppression and tyranny. (Ap- 
plause.) I had three great grandfathers, 
two of them Irish and one of them 
Scotcli, who were Revolutionary soldiers, 
and I had a father who was a Confed- 
erate soldier. And of these facts, too, 
I am quite proud, for I find that my 
strain, being Irish, is always intent either 
on trying to run the government or 
trying to pull it down. 

You Irish-descended people of the 
Northern States are proud of Shields, 
the son of an Irish emigrant, who, if 
my memory serves me aright, helped 
to direct the destinies of three Amer- 
ican commonwealths and was United 
States Senator from all three. But I 
like to think of another Irishman, Mat- 
thew Lyon by name, the son of an hum- 
ble Wicklow peasant, who was sold as 
a slave to the New England plantations 
because he, an Episcopalian, dared to 
raise his voice and his arm in defense 
of the rights of his Catholic neighbors 
and kinsmen in the Count}' of Wick- 
low ; and he bought his freedom with 
a black bull, which, according to family 
tradition, he first stole, and he became 
a United States Senator from Vermont, 
and cast the vote, against the wishes of 
his constituents, which made Thomas 
Jefiferson President of this country over 
Aaron Burr and by so doing altered the 
entire cotirse of our country's history; 
and while he was in jail in a town in 
Vermont for his attacks on the odious 
alien and sedition laws, he issued a chal- 
lenge for a duel to the President of the 
United States, and being released, he 
moved down to Kentucky and became a 
Congressman ; and later, having quar- 
reled with all his neighbors there, he 
moved on to Arkansas and was named 
as Arkansas' first territorial delegate to 
Washington, and he might have moved 
still further west and might have filled 
still more offices had he not in the full- 
ness of his maturity, when he was sev- 
enty years young, been thrown from a 
mule and had liis neck broken. I like 
to think of Matthew Lyon and his ca- 
reer because he, also, was an ancestor 
of mine. (Applause and laughter.) 

W^ell, as I said a bit ago, I set out to 
trace my Irish ancestry. In that un- 
dertaking I found a ready helper in a 
distant kinsman who was not carried 
away by the fetish that the south was 
all Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is ; and 
he worked me early and late on family 



records. Indeed, he worked me so hard 
that sometimes I think 1 might have 
likened my position to that of a colored 
brotlier in a little town in my state who 
was the only member of his race at the 
local election who voted the Democratic 
ticket. It was felt that such loyalty 
should be rewarded, so the incoming 
administration created a Department ot 
Street Clean. ng — an institution hitherto 
unknown in that community — to consist 
of a boss or foreman, and a staff. Quite 
naturall}' the job of foreman went to a 
white man, but upon the worthy colored 
person was conferred the honor of be- 
ing the Stafif. Now, he held to the 
theory, common even among those of 
the more enlightened races, that a politi- 
cal off.ce meant much honor and much 
pay but mighty little work. Neverthe- 
less, as a matter of form he carried a 
shovel with him on the morning when 
he reported for service. But the white 
man who was to serve over him had 
very different ideas regarding the obli- 
gation owing to the municipality. No 
sooner had the darkey cleaned up one 
pile of debris than the foreman would 
find another and yet another for him 
to wrestle with. It was four o'clock 
in the afternoon before the darkey so 
much as straightened his back or wiped 
the sweat- off his brow or blew on the 
new-formed blisters in the palms of his 
hands. Finally he said : "Boss, ain't 
you got nuthin' to do but jes' to think 
up things fur me to do?" 

"Yes," the white man said ; "that's 
all my job — just to keep you busy.'' 

The darky said : "Well, sub, in that 
case you will be pleased to know you 
ain't goin' to be workin' to-morrow." 
(Laughter.) 

But I kept on working and I discov- 
ered a lot of things about the lost tribes 
of the Irish in the south. Tlie State of 
Kentucky from which I hail lias been 
called the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon 
race in America, and it has been said 
that the mountaineers of that state, with 
their feuds and their Elizabethan, Chau- 
cerian methods of speech represent the 
purest strains of English blood to be 
found to-day on this continent. Now, 
then, let us see if that is true. I have 
looked into that matter and I tell you 
that fifty per cent, at least, of the dwell- 
ers of the mountains of the South and 
notalily of Kentucky and Virginia arc 
the lineal descendants of runaway inden- 
ture men, Irisli rebels mainly, from the 
Virginia plantations. I know a moun- 
tain county in Kentucky of which half 



of the population bear one of three 
names. They are either Mayos, or Pat- 
ricks, or Powers. And I once heard 
an orator stand up before an audience 
of those Mayos and Powers and Pat- 
ricks and congratulate them on their 
pure English descent, and they believed 
it! (Laughter.) 

I wish you would pardon me once 
more for referring to my line of ances- 
try, for it is testimony to prove my 
claim. On my father's side 1 am de- 
scended from a group of men who went 
from New England to Kentucky and 
the names of these men were Lyon and 
Cobb, which is a Danish corruption of 
O'Connor, and Machen, and Clendenin, 
and O'Hara, and Glenn, which is a cor- 
ruption of Glynn. What a hot bunch 
of Anglo-Saxons! (Laughter.) 

The Congressional District in which 
I was born and where I used to live 
has thirteen counties in it. Listen to 
the names of these thirteen counties ; 
Marshall, Calloway, Graves, McCracken, 
Lyon, Livingston, Caldwell, Trigg, Crit- 
tenden, Ballard, Hickman, Fulton, Car- 
lise — thirteen counties and all but two 
of them have Irish names. 

What is true of my own section of 
Kentucky is true of the rest of the 
States. Daniel Boone has been called 
the first explorer of Kentucky and it 
has been said he was of English de- 
scent. Both of those statements are 
wrong. Daniel Boone was not the first 
explorer of Kentucky. The first man 
to explore Kentucky was an Irishman 
by the name of John Finley. But be- 
fore him was still another Irishman by 
the name of McBride — James McBride. 
He lingers in state history as a shadowy 
figure, but I like to think of him as a 
red-haired chap witli a rifle in one hand 
and possibly a demijohn in the other, 
coming out through the trackless wilder- 
ness alone and landing from his canoe 
on what was afterwards to be known 
as the Dark and Bloody ground. Aside 
from his name, it is proven that he was 
an Irishman by the legendary circum- 
stances that immediately after coming 
ashore he carved his name in deep and 
enduring letters in the bark of the lar- 
gest beech tree of the forest, and claimed 
all of the land that lay within his vision 
as his own, and shot an Indian or two 
and went on his way rejoicing. As for 
Daniel Boone, the great pathfinder, he 
really was descended from the line of 
Buhun, which is Norman-Irish, and his 
mother was a Morgan, and his wife 



was a Bryan, and his father was an 
Irish Catholic. 

'i'tic records show that nearly three- 
fourths of that dauntless little band wno 
under the leadership of George Rogers 
Clark, an Irishman, waded through the 
floods to take Vincennes and tiiereby 
won all the great northwest territory 
away from the British and gave to the 
American colonies what to-day is the 
richest part of the United States, wiiere 
Irishmen — not Scotch-Irish,, nor English- 
Irish, but plain Irish-Irish men who 
were rebels and patriots by instinct and 
born adventurers by reason of the blood 
which ran in their veins. 

The first settlement of English-speak- 
ing Catholics beyond the Allegheny 
Mountains was not located in the north 
but in the south, and in my own State 
of Kentucky at that. It endures to-day, 
after having given to this country one 
of its greatest and most scholarly 
churchmen, Bishop Spaulding. (Ap- 
plause.) The children of tl:e pioneers 
of Kentucky, almost without exception, 
learned their first lessons in log cabins 
under the teachings of that strange but 
gifted race of men, the wandering Irish 
schoolmasters, who founded the old 
field schools of the South and to whom 
the South is largely indebted for the 
seeds of its culture. 

Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia, 
Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the 
brunt of the western campaigns in 1812 
against the Britisli. Irishmen from 
Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous 
battles of the Thames, and the Raison, 
and their Irish bones to-day rest in that 
ground sanctifying it and making of it 
an American shrine of patriotism. It 
was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman, 
Colonel Richard Johnson, afterwards 
Vice-President of the United States, that 
slew the great Tecumseh. A good share 
of the Kentucky and Tennessee rifle- 
men who at New Orleans stood behind 
Andy Jackson's cotton bale breastworks, 
mowing down Packcnham's Peninsular 
Veterans and making their red coats 
redder still with the life blood of those 
invaders, were Irishmen, real Irishmen. 
They proved their Irish lineage by the 
fact that they fell out and quarreled 
with Old Hickory, because he denied 
them all the credit for winning the fight, 
and he quarreled back, for he was by 
way of being an Irishman himself. 
(Laughter and applause.) 

It was a Kentucky Irishman, Dr. 
Ephraim McDowell, who performed the 
first operation for ovariotomy — per- 



formed it on a kitchen table with a mad 
husband standing over him with a drawn 
revolver, threatening to shoot him if his 
wife died under the knife. But he went 
ahead and it was a successful operation, 
and it has brought relief and life and 
sanity to millions of women all over 
the world. It was a Kentucky Irish- 
man and a soldier, Theodore O'Hara, 
who penned perhaps the most beautiful 
lyric poem, and certainly the sweetest 
tribute to the brave in our language, 
th.c immortal "Bivouac of the Dead." 
It was another Kentucky Irishman, the 
saintly poet-priest. Father Ryan, whose 
hand wrote those two fondest poems in 
memory of the Lost Cause, "The Con- 
quered Banner" and "The Sword of 
Robert E. Lee." 

In the Civil War it was a Kentuckian 
of Scotch and Irish descent who led 
the North— Abraham Lincoln — and _ it 
was another Kentuckian of mingled Irish 
and Scotch blood — Jefferson Davis — 
who was President of the Confederacy. 

The historian Collins said the five 
greatest lawyers Kentucky ever produced 
were Barry, Rowan, Haggin, Brecken- 
ridge, and Bledsoe — four Irish names 
and one Indian name — and yet these 
five have been called Anglo-Saxons, too. 

What is true of Kentucky is to a 
greater or less degree true of the rest 
of the South. It was an Irish Virginian, 
Patrick Henry, who sounded the first 
keynote of the American Revolution, 
and who at the risk of his life, by his 
words paved the way for the Declara- 
tion of Independence. The South Caro- 
lina Irishman, John C. Calhoun, first 
raised the slogan of Nullification, and it 
was another Irishman, Andrew Jackson 
of Tennessee, who swore by the Eternal 
to hang him higher than Haman if he 
carried out his plan. 

To-night you have heard a tribute, and 
a deserved one, to little Phil Sheridan 
of the North, but I want to couple his 
name with that of a Southern Irishman, 
the son of an Irish refugee, Pat Cle- 
burne of Arkansas, one of the most gal- 
lant leaders tliat the Civil War produced. 
(Applause.) Pat Cleburne died on one 
of the bloodiest battlefields of Christen- 
dom in his stocking feet because as he 
rode into battle that morning he saw 
one of his Irish boys from Little Rock 
tramping barefooted over the frozen 
furrows of a wintry cornfield and 
leaving tracks of blood behind him. 
So he drew off his boots and bade the 
soldier put them on, and fifteen minutes 
later he went to his God in his stocking 



feet. Raleigh laid down his coat before 
Good Queen Bess, and has been immor- 
talized for his cliivalry, but 1 think a 
more courtly deed was that of the gal- 
lant Irishman, Pat Cleburne. For one 
was kowtowing before royalty and the 
other had in his heart only thoughtful- 
ness and humanity for the common man 
afoot. 

Sam Houston, the first President of 
the Lone Star State, was a Tennessee 
Irishman, Irish through and through, 
and the present President of the United 
States, a Southerner also, is half Irish. 
One of the most distinguished members 
of the Supreme Court in recent years 
was a Kentucky Irishman, John M. Har- 
lan, and to-day two of the men who sit 
on that tribunal are Irishmen — White of 
Louisiana, the distinguished and hon- 
ored Chief Justice, and McReynolds of 
Tennessee. 

(Voice) How about McKenna? 

Mr. Cobb : He is not a Southerner, 
I regret to say. I suppose I could go 
on for hours, if your patience held out — 
and my throat- — telling of the achieve- 
ments of Irishmen, and of the imperish- 
able records that Irishmen have left on 
the history of that part of the Union 
from which I came, but to call the roll 
of the great men who have done great 
things and won achievement and fame 
south of Mason's and Dixon's line since 
there was such a line, would be almost 
like running through the parish regis- 
ters of the counties of Ireland, both 
north and south. Indeed, in my opinion, 
it is not altogether topography or geog- 
raphy or climate that has made the 
South what it is, and given it those dis- 
tinguishing characteristics which adorn 
it. The soft speech of the Southerner; 
his warm heart, and his hot head, his 
readiness to begin a fight, and to for- 
give Iiis opponent afterwards ; his ven- 
eration for women's chastity and his 
love for the ideals of his native land — 
all these are heritages of his Irish an- 
cestry, transmitted to him tli rough two 
generations. The North has put her 
heroes on a pension, but the South has 
put hers on a pedestal. There is not a 
Southern hamlet of any size to-day that 
has not reared a bronze or marl)le or 
granite n-'onument to its own defenders 
in the Civil War. and there is scarce a 
Southern home where at the knees of 
tlie mother the children are not taught 
to revere the memories and remember 
the deeds of Lee and Jackson and For- 
rest, the Tennessee Irishman, and Mor- 



gan, the Kentucky Irishman, and Wash- 
ington, and Light Horse Harry Lee, and 
Francis Marion, the Irish Swamp I* ox 
of the Carolinas. I believe as firmly as 
I believe anything on earth that for that 
veneration, for that love of heroism and 
for that joying in the ideals of its soil, 
tlie South is indebted mainly to the Irish 
lilood that courses through the veins of 
its sons and of its daughters. 

No, ladies and gentlemen, the lost 
Irish tribes of the South are not lost; 
they are not lost any more than the 
"wild geese" that flew across the Chan- 
nel from Ireland were lost. They are 
not lost any more than the McMahons 
who went to France, or the O'Donnells 
who went to Spain, or the Simon Boli- 
vars and the O'Higgins wlio went to 
South America, or the O'Farrells and 
the O'Briens who went to Cuba. For 
their Irish blood is of the strain that 
cannot be extinguished and it lives to- 
day, thank God, in the attributes and 
the habits and the customs and the tra- 
ditions of the South.ern people. Most of 
all it lives in one of their common char- 
acteristics, which, I think, in conclusion, 
may possibly be best suggested by the 
telling of a story that I heard some time 
ago, of an Irishman in Mobile. As the 
story goes, this Irishm>an on Sunday 
heard a clergjman preach on the Judg- 
ment Day. The priest told of the hour 
wlien the trumpet s'nall blow and all peo- 
ples of all climes and all ages shall be 
gathered before the Seat of God to be 
judged according to their deeds done in 
the flesh. After the sermon he sought 
out the pastor and he said, "Father, I 
want to ask you a few questions touch- 
ing on what you preached about to-day. 
Do you really think that on the Judg- 
ment Day everybody will be there ?" 

The priest said : "That is my under- 
standing." 

"Will Cain and Abel be there?" 

"Undoubtedly." 

"And David and Goliath — will they 
both be there?" 

"That is my information and belief." 

"And Brian Boru and Oliver Cromwell 
will be there?" 

"Assuredlv they will be present." 

"And the 'A. O. H.'s and A. P. A.'s?" 

"I am quite positive they will all be 
tliere together." 

"Father," said the parishioner, "there'll 
be damn little judgin' done the first 
day !" 

(Applause and laughter.) 



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